Idle thoughts – Unstructured musings from Joel Dunn…

Great day of brook trout fishing!

Took a vacation day on Wednesday 9/28, and drove up to the Virginia mountains with my fishing buddy Sam. We’d been trying to get a chance to get out out of town, and finally our schedules intersected. Got a late start, as I had to drive my son to school (early period marching band, before the buses run), so we didn’t leave Chapel Hill until about 8AM. A couple of stops for coffee, and we got to our destination in the hills near the conflux of the James & Maury rivers around 11:30. I first tried a size 14 caddis that had worked for me in the summer when I first fished this stream, and that was too big. I was not getting the rises, but Sam was having good success on a size 16 parachute adams, with a zelon tail. I scored a couple of flies from him, and we were both catching fish. Nice brookies in the plunge pools, beautiful colors, with the fish mostly in the 7″-9″ range, which is quite a lot of fun on the light rods we were using. I was using a 00-wt Sage TXL, and Sam had his 1-wt Scott. We fished upstream until about 3PM, each of us catching about 20 trout. Wonderful weather, wonderful fishing. Then, we headed back to my truck, and drove over to the Maury River, and got our 7 wt rods to try for some smallmouth bass. The Maury was low and as clear as a trout stream, and we were optimistic. However, the fish were hard to find. We each finally picked up a couple of smallies each, ~10″, both using Shenks white streamers. A great steak in Lynchburg on the way back was a great way to finish the day.